An optical bow shock around the nearby millisecond pulsar J2124-3358

Abstract

We report the discovery of an H-alpha-emitting bow-shock nebula powered by the nearby millisecond pulsar J2124-3358. The bow shock is very broad, and is highly asymmetric about the pulsar's velocity vector. This shape is not consistent with that expected for the case of an isotropic wind interacting with a homogeneous ambient medium. Models which invoke an anisotropy in the pulsar wind, a bulk flow of the surrounding gas, or a density gradient in the ambient medium either perpendicular or parallel to the pulsar's direction of motion also fail to reproduce the observed morphology. However, we find an ensemble of good fits to the nebular morphology when we consider a combination of these effects. In all such cases, we find that the pulsar is propagating through an ambient medium of mean density 0.8-1.3 cm^(-3) and bulk flow velocity ~15-25 km/s and that the star has recently encountered an increase in density by 1-10 cm^(-3) over a scale ~<0.02 pc. The wide variety of models which fit the data demonstrate that in general there is no unique set of parameters which can be inferred from the morphology of a bow-shock nebula.

6 pages, uses emulateapj, ApJ Letters, in press

References in corpus (8)

• Chandra imaging of the X-ray nebula powered by pulsar B1509-58
• Millisecond Pulsar Velocities
• The Small-scale Structure in Interstellar HI: A Resolvable Puzzle
• Bow Shocks from Neutron Stars: Scaling Laws and HST Observations of the Guitar Nebula
• Pulsar bow-shock nebulae. II. Hydrodynamical simulation
• Modeling Nonaxisymmetric Bow Shocks: Solution Method and Exact Analytic Solutions
• Discovery of an optical bow-shock around pulsar B0740-28
• Pulsar bow-shock nebulae. III. Inclusion of a neutral component, and H_{a lpha} luminosity

Cited by in corpus (27)

• The Evolution and Structure of Pulsar Wind Nebulae
• An expanding radio nebula produced by a giant flare from the magnetar SGR 1806-20
• The Mouse That Soared: High Resolution X-ray Imaging of the Pulsar-Powered Bow Shock G359.23-0.82
• Balmer-Dominated Shocks: A Concise Review
• Relativistic MHD simulations of pulsar bow-shock nebulae
• XMM-Newton observations of PSR B1823-13: An asymmetric synchrotron nebula around a Vela-like pulsar
• Discovery of the two wings of the Kookaburra complex in VHE gamma -rays with H.E.S.S
• A Survey for H$\alpha$ Pulsar Bow Shocks
• Smashing the Guitar: An Evolving Neutron Star Bow Shock
• Electron Density Structure of the Local Galactic Disk
• The X-ray Structure of the Pulsar Bow Shock G189.22+2.90 in the Supernova Remnant IC 443
• X-ray emission properties of the old pulsar PSR B2224+65
• Three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations of asymmetric pulsar wind bow shocks
• Systematic and Stochastic Variations in Pulsar Dispersion Measures
• Hubble Space Telescope detection of the millisecond pulsar J2124-3358 and its far-ultraviolet bow shock nebula
• Studying Millisecond Pulsars in X-rays
• The proper motion of the isolated neutron star RX J1605.3+3249
• Searches for diffuse X-ray emission around millisecond pulsars: An X-ray nebula associated with PSR J2124-3358
• To see or not to see a Bow Shock: Identifying Bow Shocks with H-Alpha Allsky Surveys
• The Balmer-dominated Bow Shock and Wind Nebula Structure of Gamma-ray Pulsar PSR J1741-2054
• Searching for substellar companions of young isolated neutron stars
• An In Situ Study of Turbulence Near Stellar Bow Shocks
• Bow shocks around pulsars and neutron stars
• Reconstructing the Guitar: Blowing Bubbles with a Pulsar Bow Shock Back Flow
• Bow-shock Pulsar Wind Nebulae Passing Through Density Discontinuities
• VLT observations of the solitary millisecond pulsar PSR J2124-3358
• Pulsar bow shocks as probes of warm neutral gas